Selection 10: Gradual Speed

Date: 21 April 2013, 20:00 - Location: SPHINX cinema

Dialogues with new work by Belgian filmmakers.

Bouquets 21-30

Rose Lowder, Country: FR, 2005, 16mm, colour

Bouquets 21-30 is a part of the ecological Bouquets series, consisting of one-minute films composed in the camera by weaving the characteristics of different environments with the activities there at the time. The filming basically entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed.

Gradual Speed

Els Van Riel, Country: BE, 2013, 16mm, b&w, 50'

"Remembering Vladimir Shevchenko” : an unexpected ode at the end of a film that at first seems to have itself as its subject: film as matter, form, experience of light, movement, time (the title refers to the gradual increase in the speed of filming). Shevchenko was one of the first filmmakers to see the appalling consequences of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and record them on sensitive plate. The actual degree of that “sensitivity” later revealed itself when he noticed that his film material itself showed traces of radiation – which would also result in his own death. Light, radiation, photography: it is a relationship that hangs like a dark cloud over the history of the 20th century, from visual experiments with x-rays to atomic shadows on the walls of Hiroshima. It is this inextricable relationship that casts its long shadow across this musing film sculpture, like an afterthought that reminds us that film is primarily a body that carries within it the light traces of other bodies, always balancing between appearing and disappearing.